Internationally acclaimed, bilingual singer/songwriter and 2021 Houston Chronicle "Musician of the Year," Amanda Pascali was born in Queens, New York, and is based in Houston, Texas. The award-winning songwriter and lyric translator has released music and performed internationally, from the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. to the European Union Parliament in Brussels and packed houses around the world. In 2022-2023, she embarked on a year-long trip through Italy to preserve, translate, and revitalize Sicilian folk songs as a Fulbright Fellow and ambassador endorsed by the US State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
With a father who was thrown out of his home country for rebelling against the government, Amanda was driven from a young age to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora. As the rising voice of America's most ethnically diverse generation of young people, 25-year-old Pascali writes songs that speak to the experience of growing up as a first-generation American. Amanda’s music, now coined, Immigrant American Folk delivers a powerful narrative on being- “too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both”.
original songs
Released in July of 2022, The Messenger EP is named after the purpose Amanda created for herself when she picked up a guitar for the first time at 12-years-old: to be a messenger of her family’s stories and diaspora as immigrants in America.
Temporary Home (Official Music Video) - Amanda Pascali
Amanda’s solo performance at the 2021 Folk Alliance International Conference representing the Southwest Regional Folk Alliance
Amanda performs her original song “Uccellino - Little Bird” live in Houston with a trio
Sicilian songs in translation
Amanda performs as a duo with multi-instrumentalist Addison Freeman on her translation of a Sicilian folk song, filmed in Palermo, Sicily.